sieve.
A device with a mesh, grate, or otherwise perforated bottom to separate, in a granular material, larger particles from smaller ones, or to separate solid objects from a liquid.
Meaning & usage
A device with a mesh, grate, or otherwise perforated bottom to separate, in a granular material, larger particles from smaller ones, or to separate solid objects from a liquid.
Use the sieve to get the pasta from the water.
A process, physical or abstract, that arrives at a final result by filtering out unwanted pieces of input from a larger starting set of input.
Given a list of consecutive numbers starting at 1, the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm will find all of the prime numbers.
A kind of coarse basket.
A person, or their mind, that cannot remember things or is unable to keep secrets.
An intern who lets too many non-serious cases into the emergency room.
A collection of morphisms in a category whose codomain is a certain fixed object of that category, which collection is closed under precomposition by any morphism in the category.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English sive, syfe, from Old English sife, from Proto-West Germanic *sibi (“sieve”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyp-, *seyb- (“to pour, sieve, strain, run, drip”). Akin to German Sieb, Dutch zeef, Proto-Slavic *sito (Russian си́то (síto), сев (sev), се́ять (séjatʹ)).
To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.
To concede; to let in.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English sive, syfe, from Old English sife, from Proto-West Germanic *sibi (“sieve”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyp-, *seyb- (“to pour, sieve, strain, run, drip”). Akin to German Sieb, Dutch zeef, Proto-Slavic *sito (Russian си́то (síto), сев (sev), се́ять (séjatʹ)).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.